Texifter’s most recent historical Twitter prize winners include three from the United States, one from Great Britain, and one from France. Winners receive Enterprise access to DiscoverText for six months, and Sifter credit for up to three historical Twitter days and 200,000 tweets. The following is a snapshot of the most recent winners and their proposed research projects.
Diana Ascher
PhD student in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA
@dianaascher
“Helping Companies Streamline Information”
Ascher proposes exploring cultural time orientation by analyzing the Twitter feeds from three news organizations to better understand how “information agents’ cultural backgrounds affect corporate information practice,” and specifically how organizations decide what information to share and when. Ascher hopes the research will help businesses streamline their information activity and routines, and help managers understand “how employees decide what’s important and what’s not.”
Stephen Barnard
Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at St. Lawrence University
@socsavvy
“Better Understanding Journalism via Boston Marathon Bombing Twitter Data”
Barnard plans to use Sifter to collect and analyze Twitter data about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. He will use Twitter’s PowerTrack filters to conduct a detailed search of Tweets that reported on the bombing, and compare the results to the responses from professional and citizen journalists.
“I hope to gain a better understanding of the reporting processes and outcomes emerging from both groups,” Barnard writes, adding that he will use the findings to “highlight the structural relations of the emerging journalistic field.”
Oliver Haimson
PhD Student in the Informatics Department at University of California, Irvine @oliverhaimson
“Analyzing Hashtags”
Haimson’s plans to use the prize to analyze the hashtags #nymwars and #mynameis, which were used in 2011 and 2014 to critique Google’s and Facebook’s “real name” policies. He plans to evaluate the Twitter data from these two hashtags “using computational linguistics, qualitative coding, and social network analysis.”
Omar Jaafor
PhD Student in the Department of Operational Research, Applied Statistics and Simulation at University of Technology of Troyes
@lmhasher
“Developing Algorithms for Social Networks”
Jaafor and fellow researchers will use the prize to continue to develop “clustering and anomaly detection algorithms for social networks in a big data environment.”
Wasim Ahmed
PhD Student in the Health Informatics Research Group at the University of Sheffield’s Information Department
@was3210
“Responding to Infectious Disease Outbreaks”
Ahmed will use his prize to “study how users respond to outbreaks on infectious diseases on social media platforms, such as Twitter.” He plans to use his data towards his PhD “Pandemics and epidemics: User reactions on social media and Web 2.0 platforms.”
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